


The Break Down of a Story

by ouroboros221



Category: ParaNorman (2012)
Genre: Explanations, Gen, Hysterics, story time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 13:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ouroboros221/pseuds/ouroboros221
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, it's the little things, the straw that breaks the camel's back. Oftentimes, it's those things nobody watches out for. Two pairs of listening ears, a newspaper clipping, and a story that hasn't been told to anyone else. </p><p>Norman's pent-up stress finally breaks, and the once dammed waters flow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Break Down of a Story

**Author's Note:**

> I found it interesting that the movie didn't show Norman actually telling someone living that "The Witch was an eleven year old girl like me. Her name was Aggie." And while I think that eventually others got the full story, it was enough of an idea to get me writing. That and if I were Norman, it would take one heck of a time before I actually told anyone the full story of that night. After all, would you be all that keen on admitting that you could empathize with a three hundred year old ghost who could tear up the town in less than one night?
> 
> As for the newspaper article mentioned later on in the story. You can find it here http://www.blithehollowbugle.com/issue348.html

It was two and a half weeks since the anniversary of Agatha’s death, Norman still couldn’t think of her as “the Witch” even in his mind. And Norman had mostly gotten on track to a better life, one where people actually believed he could see and talk to ghosts and them not absolutely hating him for it. Sure, there were a few people here and there that would look at him with a barely disguised face of disgust, but nowadays those people were farther and farther in between the people who would greet him with a smile or a simple wave. 

His friendship with Neil was becoming even stronger, and for that Norman was grateful. The red haired kid often walked with Norman from school and would come over on the weekends to make some kind of an offer to play whenever he had the chance. Norman even took him up on his hockey game he had offered during that mess of a night.

All in all, Norman felt that things were pretty good. But sometimes in the dark of the night when everything was quiet or when he just couldn’t fully entrance himself in zombie movies, little seemingly harmless thoughts would creep up through the floor board of his mind. Like vermin they would wiggle into the knotholes and crevices of his brain. 

Whispers of how Agatha had been exactly like him, not in physical form true, but it would have been all too easy for the townspeople to remedy at least one of her accusations at Norman. Life was such a fragile thing, and people, scared people oftentimes only realize what they do in their frenzy after it’s too late. He had heard the mob muttering about how he was in league with the zombies and seen their faces after Agatha’s storm. Admittedly he had ignored their comments at the time, only really able to focus on Agatha’s face inside the cloud. But still… after he had warned them at the admittedly disastrous school play, they honestly thought that he could command such power? 

And if he did have that power, would he be like Agatha? Hurting and angry, lashing out at anyone and everyone. He was not blind; he could see the parallels between the two of them. His words to her, when he was talking and telling her story, were proof enough of that. 

But, some traitorous miniscule part of him, kept whispering, kept screaming: _“Look how fast they turned on you.” “Did you see that flinch; he really does believe you can control the dead.” “How could they? They were all about to burn down a building, containing centuries of records and history, but more importantly containing you, your sister, and three other children.” “Their fear could have killed you, how forgiving would you be then?”_

His grandma thankfully hadn’t noticed too much of what was going on inside his head. Though he did get a few strange glances from her his way, nothing came up in conversation, which Norman was glad for. He didn’t really want to tell his grandmother too much about that night, she would only worry about things that couldn’t be changed.

Norman tried to ignore those thoughts, tried to simply go on with his life. But it isn’t exactly easy to ignore something in your own head. He, of course, knew he wasn’t going to forget that night. After he had talked to Neil, and gotten home to sleep, he had documented everything he could possibly remember. He now had one journal almost completely filled with what he had seen and heard that night and the nights leading up to it, along with several amateur sketches detailing some of the things that were harder to describe. Such as his time in what he had concluded to be a different world of Agatha’s making where the ground broke apart underneath him.

He had even sketched Aggie a bit: when she was still so angry and lightning was blurring her form, when she had multiplied herself to surround him and push at him desperately trying to get him to stop telling her story, and finally two where she had taken on her true appearance of a young girl, one from when he was standing and talking to her and one for when she had fallen asleep on his shoulder fading away into the gentle breeze. They weren’t the greatest of sketches, but they were enough for him to use to remember. 

He pulled out his journal and leafed through the pages quickly as he did so. Trying to see if there was anything he needed to add, or replace. Especially when it came to the sketches of Agatha, and the old townspeople. 

Seeing nothing, he left the book on his bed and went downstairs to the garage to collect some newspaper for his paper-mache. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to make, but he believed he would figure something out along the way.

As he walked toward the door, Courtney appeared and started talking to him. “Hey there. Anyways Mom had to go to the store and asked me to watch you, if you go out can you let me know?” Norman smiled, after that night Courtney was more attentive to her brother, but she never tried to smother him or know exactly what he was doing every second. For that Norman was grateful. 

“Sure.” He answered. “I’m just going to get some old newspaper for an idea.” 

“Alright.” Courtney smiled, ruffling his hair as she stepped out of his way. “Just don’t get too messy, ya hear me? Mom said she’ll start right on dinner when she gets home.”

“Kay!” Norman said as he walked into the garage.

Norman quickly walked over to an old stack of carefully folded paper his dad hadn’t gotten rid of yet. It was only a matter of time before his mom made his father clean out the garage in preparation for the winter. She had even complained at the dinner table yesterday that the garage had too much stuff inside it. Which was when Norman asked if he could use the old papers for a project of his. He was given permission as long as he didn’t mess up anything else in the room. 

Norman grabbed a small armful of paper to take back to his room, figuring that if he needed more he could always come back down to grab more. Walking back up the stairs and opening his door proved to be a bit of a hassle, but Norman did it and dropped the newspapers onto his desk. He then sat down and started to methodically tear the paper into strips, making sure that it would be ready once he finally started to glue it all together.

He stopped however, when his eyes caught onto something interesting. In the lower right hand corner of the paper was a picture of his uncle. This newspaper had been published in June 2012, a few short months before his uncle had died. Inspecting the page a bit more, Norman saw the words his uncle had once written to the town. The very same town and dismissed him as a lunatic and a mental case.

Norman mouthed the words his uncle had written, laughing flatly and quietly at the end where his uncle laughed at the entire town. His own mouth started twitching as he finished the letter, and by the time he had set the newspaper down, the small muscle spasms had turned into full out laughter. 

“He was right.” Norman gasped through his laughter. “He was right. I was right.” Norman breathed in harshly, his eyes too bright and too wide.

“We were right!” Norman shouted suddenly, a strange, unsettling smile on his face.. “We were right! We were right!” He started to laugh, just a bit at first, but slowly louder and louder until his mantra became almost unintelligible. “We were right!”

Distantly, Norman thought he could hear the voice of his beloved grandmother, but for once he paid the voice no mind, caught up in his realization.

** ** **

Meanwhile downstairs Courtney was watching some television, texting a few times on her phone before her eyes glued themselves right back to the screen. This documentary about meerkats was actually pretty interesting. 

She jumped when the doorbell rung out throughout the house. She sighed and walked to the door, glancing back behind to double check that it was still commercial; if it was a salesman she would be so pissed. However, that train of thought immediately halted when she spotted Norman’s friend, Neil waving happily at her. 

“Hiya Courtney. Is Norman home? I was thinking we could go and play in the trees.” Neil grinned at her.

Courtney smiled gently back. “Sure. He’s up in his room. I was just going to check on him, so I’ll come up with you.” 

Together they walked up the stairs, asking how each other’s day had gone. Once they got to the top of the stairs, they stopped talking, both hearing a strange sound coming from Norman’s room. Shooting each other puzzled glances, they walked carefully to his slightly open door. 

No doubt about it, Norman was inside his room, but what in the world was he doing to cause such strange noises. Was that a shriek? Courtney quickly opened the door fully to make sure her brother was alright. What she saw, however, baffled her more than she cared to admit.

Norman was laughing, high pitched and nonstop, gasping for breath every minute or so, repeating over and over: “We were right! We were right!” At least, Courtney thought that is what he said, his laughter making it hard to understand the garbled words.

“Norman?” She asked at his shaking back. She cautiously reached out a hand. “Hey, what’s so fun-“ She stopped dead silent as Norman turned to see who was it touching his shoulder. 

Norman looked at her, his half-open mouth emitting small gasps as he visibly tried to get himself under control. His eyes were bright and watery. He held out a half torn-up newspaper toward her, with his uncle’s face visible to her. “We were right.” It seemed that he simply couldn’t stop repeating that.

“Hold on. Hold on, Norman. What were you guys right about?” Courtney asked Norman, puzzled from his behavior, but took the proffered newspaper and began to look it over. While still keeping at least one eye on the stranger than normal Norman.

“We were right. About everything. The town. Aggie’s curse. What would happen.” Norman’s smile grew wide again, and he started to breathe quickly in and out form his teeth.

Courtney’s brow furrowed. “Norman. I can’t understand you, start from the beginning.” Neil edged slightly closer to Courtney from behind, wondering why Norman was acting so odd. Even when he talked to ghosts, he always seemed so composed, if sometimes a bit standoffish. But now it seemed like Norman was breaking apart at the seams, and it was starting to scare Neil.

So Norman started at the beginning, further back than anyone in the room expected. “Uncle Prenderghast told the town that the “witch’s curse” was real. Nobody believed him. I told them that the dead would rise. Nobody believed me. Then he told me to save the town from the “witch’s curse” and I promised I would.” Norman then elaborated on just what happened to him that night on the anniversary of the witch’s death. 

Courtney and Neil were quiet. Neither of them had heard the full story yet, Courtney and her parents had agreed not to push Norman for details. And even though Neil was burning with curiosity, he had decided for once to let Norman come to him on this matter. Well, the two shared a glance, they were certainly hearing the story now.

When Norman had gotten to his outburst in the town hall, Courtney winced. She had been running scared, but still that wasn’t an excuse for abandoning her brother. However, she listened closely, never fully gleaning the events that had caused her brother to lead a group of zombies out of a burning building.

“So, I went upwards, to see if I could talk to the witch. I dodged zombies and got to the roof of the Town Hall. But it wasn’t high enough, so I started to climb the old ladder to the water tower. I could hear people shouting from below at me, something about me being a “necromancer”. As if I could control anything. But I didn’t stop climbing; I had to try to get the witch to stop. And I read from the book, but it wasn’t working. So I asked her why she was doing all of this, why she was destroying the town.” Here Norman laughed a little, but his small grin was much less wild that it was earlier. It seemed that whatever caused his outbreak of laughter earlier was losing steam. 

“I guess she heard me, because the next thing I knew a green lightning bolt shot right towards me.” Both Courtney and Neil gasped at this point, while Courtney had seen singe marks on Norman’s shirt, she had simply assumed it was from the building and the fire inside, not a lightning bolt. Norman, however continued on oblivious to the distress of the two people near him. “I fell off the ladder and the past crept in through the cracks again. When I came too, all I could see was the judge’s face in front of me. Saying how “Agatha Prenderghast” had been accused of witchcraft and found guilty. I don’t think I really heard the “Agatha Prenderghast” part, not until I heard crying behind me and turned around to see a girl about my age.” 

At this point Norman scrambled over to his bed to flip through his journal, stopping on a page he had sketched of Aggie as a little girl, looking astonishingly like Norman. “See?”

Norman continued on. “The judge went on about how she was “playing with fire” by “speaking to the dead”. They started closing in on her and she told them that they would suffer. And then I woke up to see the old townspeople. I was kinda afraid of them at first.” Norman looked a bit embarrassed during this part, as if someone would make fun of him for being frightened of people who he had just seen sentence a little girl to death. Especially since it was because of doing something he did every day. “But we talked and I knew I had to go and tell everyone outside to calm down.”

He glanced at Courtney and Neil, ignoring their horrified faces. “Sorry for not looking for you, I had thought you all had gotten out a while back, when you left. If I had known you were still in there I would have found you and gotten you out too.”

He continued on pretty much repeating the situation from his point of view, how he tried to tell the people that the curse was for the three hundred year old townspeople and not the ones living right now. The car ride was pretty much glossed over, though Norman hinted that the old judge had not exactly been insulting Courtney when he had moved off her seat. 

Norman became quieter and quieter as he stumbled through his tale, but he continued on regardless of his energy levels. “After the trees separated us, I kept walking to Agatha’s tree. I couldn’t stop when I was so close. And I started trying to talk to her, to see if she would go back to sleep willingly.” Norman gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “Yeah, it didn’t work. She got really angry at me instead. I had to dodge spikes of roots coming up from the ground as I got closer to her tree. Word of advice in those situations, don’t stop moving.” Courtney’s eyes widened as she realized what her brother had gone through to talk to Agatha, and it wasn’t over yet.

“She got really really angry at me for coming as close as I did. And when I started telling her **her** story she tried everything she could think of to get me to stop.” Even Neil winced, not wanting to think about what such a powerful being could do to Norman when she was angry at him.

Courtney interrupted. “Don’t you mean, “tell her a story” Norman?” 

Norman blinked his faceted eyes at his sister, confused. “No. I told her her story. Her own story of her life and death.”

Norman glossed over what happened after he mentioned that Agatha had taken him to some kind of intangible world she controlled, at least that’s what he and Grandma had concluded. Feeling a bit more in his right mind, he didn’t want his sister or his friend to pity him. He mentioned the ground splitting up beneath him, but not the way Agatha slammed him against the tree. He did tell them about how he had tried to get Agatha to remember by grabbing her hand and talking to her, and mostly left it at that.

“Then, everything went white. I blinked a couple of times to get my vision back, and once I did I saw a little girl in front of me. It was Agatha, only she looked like she did when I saw her in the Town Hall. She told me that her name was Aggie.” Norman paused to scrub his face just a bit, both Courtney and Neil politely kept quiet. 

“She fell asleep in the clearing, and faded away. And then you guys found me.” With that, Norman’s story had finally been told, as much as he himself would tell it at least. He hugged his journal to his chest, not wanting to look up at the others.

Courtney and Neil both had almost reached out to Norman more than once throughout his story, but it was only now once he had come to the end that they both gave him a hug.

“Why are you hugging me?” Norman asked, confused, but happy with the turn of events. 

“Why not, stupid?” It was clear though from Courtney’s voice that the term wasn’t meant as an insult. “You had to fight a ghost!”

“But I didn’t fight her.” Norman protested, but he was hugging the both of them back.

“Whatever Norman! You stood up to a three hundred year old angry ghost who could make tree spikes come up from the ground! How in the world does that not deserve a hug?” Courtney said the last part gently, holding onto her brother carefully, as if he would melt away from her grip.

“Yeah! You’re awesome Norman! You helped break a curse! How cool is that?” Neil babbled on excitedly.

“Thanks guys.” Norman lowered his eyes to the ground.

The whispers quieted after that day. Though they were still around, it had finally hit home for Norman that he wasn’t facing the world alone; he had his sister and his best friend Neil, his grandmother, and even his parents. They would stand by him, and he could ask for help now.


End file.
